Dear friends,

Happy New Year!  I pray that you had a wonderful Christmas celebration with friends, family, or on your own.  Thank you for the many cards, gifts and good wishes shared with me during the holiday season.  I am especially grateful for your monetary gift.  I am looking forward to exchanging it for a tablet computer – my first exposure to touch-screen technology.  Ask me how I'm doing....

2011 was quite a year for our congregation.  We had to alert you to our very precarious financial situation, and so many of you stepped up your giving.  Thank you!  I am pleased to report that it looks like we will end the year in the black.  This was vitally important considering that we have no financial reserves.  However, we cannot let up on our efforts.  Even though an austere budget was approved for 2012, it still relies on $141,000 in offering income to meet expenses for the year.  If every confirmed member gave about $700 during the year, we would easily meet that challenge.  But of course, not all our members are in a position to give at that level, so those who can afford to give more simply must do so if we are to survive.

But Zion’s survival is not all about finances.  If we are to take Jesus’ teachings seriously, we must continue to make disciples of all nations and to feed the hungry, clothe the naked, provide for the orphan and widow, and support our neighbor in any way we can.  This is the church’s mission.  And while Zion is in “survival” mode, we must continue to keep our mission at the center or there is no reason to continue as a congregation.

Back in September the Congregation Council and Long Range Planning Committee met with assistant to the bishop Virginia Cover.  Acknowledging Zion’s dwindling financial and membership resources, she remarked: “What you have been doing for the last 50 to 100 years is no longer working.  You need to be prepared to change.  You need to do things differently.  You need to think outside the box, to do some radical thinking.  You need to stop asking how you can get people to come to you and begin to think about how you can go out to meet them, the unchurched.  You need to figure out how the church can again become relevant.”

Such radical thinking, change and “different-ness” does not happen overnight.  A congregation is like a huge ship, and you cannot turn a ship around with a tiny rudder.  So we are taking our time to figure out in which direction we need to go and what steps we need to take to turn our Zion ship around and become relevant to our community.  We seek your help and guidance and above all, your support.

Bishop Mike Rinehart of the Texas-Louisiana Gulf Coast Synod posted an article on his blog last month which caused quite a bit of cyber-buzz.  In the article, Bishop Rinehart suggested that the “turnaround of the mainline churches will happen when we in those churches care as much about those outside the church, as we do those inside. To embrace relevance, we will have to let go of survival.”

Peter Drucker once said, “When the rate of change outside the organization exceeds the rate of change inside the organization, the organization is doomed.”  Our world is moving at an ever-faster speed, it seems.  So how do we keep the church from being doomed to extinction?  We change. We adapt. We do exactly what the church has done over the last 2000 years.  Not surprisingly, the church has adapted, survived and even thrived in times of tectonic change in the past. It can again.

I think we can all agree that change is hard.  But, as Bishop Rinehart acknowledges, “Change....is non-negotiable. The only constant in life is change. There is no growth without change. As someone once said, “The only one who likes change is a wet baby.” Any kind of change creates conflict.  Most organizations won’t change until they’re desperate, like the alcoholic that won’t go to rehab until s/he hits rock bottom.  So what will give us the courage to take those risks?”

Maybe Zion has hit rock bottom and simply must change to survive.  I don't know.  But I agree with Bishop Rinehart that we need to focus our energies on reaching those outside rather than appeasing those on the inside.  Let's face it: the United States is no longer a Christian nation.  Nearly two generations of US citizens have little or no relationship to the church whatsoever.  Our world is a mess, hell-bent on destruction in countless ways, and it desperately needs the church, the Good News of Jesus Christ and his forgiveness.  People need a place of safety and sanctuary from the craziness of the world in order to make sense of their own mortality.

Bishop Rinehart says the world “is desperately in need of a church that offers a Way of peace, truth, compassion and hope, as opposed to the world’s way of power, materialism, exploitation and violence.... It needs a church that looks less like the Pharisees’ religion and more like Jesus’ ministry. It needs a church that is willing to sacrifice everything for those outside: buildings, budgets, sacred cows, traditions, structures. It needs a church that so loves the world, that she’d be willing to die for it.”

Can Zion be that kind of church?

Blessings,

Pastor Gwenn